20 October 2009 20:15
Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Magazine
by alphoenix
It’s easy to write off Twitter as a happy accident, a right-place, right-time fluke. But that misses the point. When Twitter’s creators designed the service, they made a series of crucial and deliberate decisions — ones that seem brilliant in retrospect — that created the conditions that allow users to innovate. The first was a commitment to simplicity. A little history: Williams’ previous company was a podcasting venture called Odeo. After Apple started distributing podcasts in June 2005, Odeo was pretty much redundant, so Williams started looking for a new idea. Jack Dorsey, one of his engineers, had one for him: status updates — specifically, brief reports that answered questions like: Where are you? What are you doing?
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